San Francisco City Tour | Divina Tours Inc.

The main square of the city with the best fashion, jewelry, department stores and technology stores along with renowned restaurants, bars and hotels. Union Square today is the main square of the city where you will find department stores such as Macy’s, Neiman Marcus and numerous shops with the most important names in the world of high fashion and the most famous jewelers. The square takes its name from the first pro-union meeting at the time of the American Civil War of 1861. The monument erected in the center is reminiscent of the sailors of the United States Navy. The adjacent Financial Center is the second most important center on the U.S. stock market after Wall Street in New York.

San Francisco is home to the largest Chinese neighborhood in the West. Founded in 1840, it is the place discussed in the world of cinema, literature, music and photography. Crossing the “Dragon Gate” characterized by portals with dragon sculptures, a symbol of traditional Chinese culture, you go along Grant Avenue, a myriad of typical shops and restaurants, the setting for numerous Hollywood films with actors such as Bruce Lee, Will Smith, Clint Eastwood and Eddie Murphy, especially interesting for the architecture that blends the oriental with the western style. Stockton Street, with its food markets, which runs parallel to Grant Avenue, is the heart of the neighborhood and deserves a closer look.

This neighborhood is the “Little Italy” of San Francisco and historically it has been home to a large Italian-American population. There are many Italian restaurants, although other ethnic groups currently live in the neighborhood. It was also the historic center of the Beatnik subculture and has become one of San Francisco’s main nightlife districts.

This neighborhood takes its name from the dawn of the city in the mid-1800s when immigrants from all over the world arrived in the city during the “gold rush” of 1849. Many immigrant Italian fishermen devoted themselves to fishing and settled in the nearby area called North Beach. Since then, the area has been the starting point for the fishing industry. In the 70s and 80s, after the decline in fishing activity, the area was redeveloped as a tourist attraction. Today it is the center of tourist activity with an average annual presence of over 16 million tourists per year (2016 data, a record year).

The Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina district is a monumental structure originally built for the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 to display the works of art presented there. It is one of the few surviving structures of the Exhibition, remaining in its original site, rebuilt in 1965.

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When it was built in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was the first longest suspension bridge in the world with an impressive distance, for the time, of 2.8 km. Overlooking the bay to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west, it connects the coast between north and south, avoiding the expensive trip around the San Francisco bay which measures approximately 60 ml (97 km). Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is a large rectangular park of 1017 acres (4.1 km²), 174 acres more than Central Park in New York, to which it is often compared. With 13 million annual visitors, Golden Gate Park is the third most visited urban park in the United States after Central Park in New York and Lincoln Park in Chicago. The sports facilities allow the visitor to practice all sports, have a picnic, visit the Academy of Sciences (sustainable building designed by Renzo Piano, Italian architect) and the Museum of Contemporary Art “De Young”. There are many botanical gardens, including the Japanese tea garden.

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During the 1967 “Summer of Love”, psychedelic rock music was entering the mainstream, receiving more and more space on commercial radios. Scott McKenzie’s song “San Francisco (be sure to wear flowers in your hair)” became a hit that year: the neighborhood’s fame reached its peak becoming a paradise for many rock artists and psychedelic bands of the time. Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin all lived in the neighborhood and immortalized the moment of the world with songs from that period.

Twin Peaks owes its name to the two peaks, about 283 meters high, from which you can admire a 360 ° view of the city and the bay of San Francisco, as well as the Pacific Ocean. The view of the “Skyline” of the city center is extraordinary.

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Commonly referred to as “The Castro”, it is a neighborhood at the foot of Twin Peaks. Castro was one of the first gay neighborhoods in the United States. After passing through a popular neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s, it remains one of the most important symbols of activism for the LGBTQ community in the world.

The historic district of Alamo Square is important for the set of residential architecture created by illustrious architects covering the period from 1870 to the 1920s. the famous “Postcard Row” with its downtown city skyline backdrop is identified worldwide with San Francisco as the trams, climbs and descents of the many hills and sea lions of Fisherman’s Wharf … With a variety of architectural styles, the neighborhood is unified in its residential character, type of construction, materials (mainly wood), intense ornaments (especially at the entrance and cornice). The term was first used in Victorian homes in San Francisco by the writers Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen in their 1978 book Painted Ladies.

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The San Francisco Civic Center is an area that contains many of the largest governmental and cultural institutions in the city. It has two large squares (Civic Center Plaza and United Nations Plaza) and a series of classical architectural buildings: City Hall, Symphony Hall, Opera House, Herbst Theater, State of California Building, Court House, Asian Art Museum and the main Public Library.

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Fisherman’s Wharf or, when available, Union Square.